CFP: From Colony to Transnation

CFP: From Colony to Transnation

CFP: FROM COLONY TO TRANSNATION: AN ASAL CONFERENCE IN HONOUR OF ROBERT DIXON

5-6 December 2019, the University of Sydney

Draft program and registration now open. Please go to: https://slam-events.sydney.edu.au/calendar/from-colony-to-transnation/

This conference marks the retirement of Robert Dixon as Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Over a long and productive career Robert has worked in institutions right across the country, from New South Wales and Queensland to Western Australia. His research encompasses Australian literary and visual cultures along with contemporary writing, and his many publications include The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales, 1788-1860 (1986), Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 (1995), Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance (2001), Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (2013), and Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time (2014), as well as several co-edited works on topics as diverse as Australian vernacular modernities, the digital humanities, Frank Hurley’s diaries, the works of Richard Flanagan, and the transnational turn in literary studies. Though broad in scope, as befits Robert’s research interests, the conference will take up some particular focuses that have marked his career. We are therefore looking for papers on the following themes:

•        Early colonial Australian writing and literary cultures.
•        Colonial popular fiction and travel writing
•        Australian literature, photography and early cinema
•        Vernacular modernities/modernisms
•        Australian literature and the world republic of letters
•        Reading the nation via the transnation: questions of scale and/or
          perspective

Please send a 250 word abstract to [email protected] by Friday 2 August 2019.

Brigid Rooney
Peter Kirkpatrick